


True Colours

by Lempo Soi (Lemposoi)



Category: Green Hornet (2011), Red Dwarf
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Crimes & Criminals, Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-09
Updated: 2011-09-09
Packaged: 2017-10-23 13:40:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 18,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/250910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lemposoi/pseuds/Lempo%20Soi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave Lister is in love. Too bad he's also on the run from the law with a couple of deserters and a mechanic turned vigilante.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Written for AU-BigBang, a crossover that is canon divergence for Red Dwarf and a whole new AU setting for Britt, Kato and Lenore.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cover art by the Reg!

Britt Reid had turned out to be a rotten date.  
   
Kochanski didn't consider herself prejudiced, but it was hard not to think it was at least partly because he was American. He was just so very American - loud, big, self-important and crass about having a lot of money. The fact that he seemed to consider himself entitled to sex by the end of the night was a smeghead feature that knew no national borders.  
   
To be fair, he'd been a laugh at first. They'd had reservations at Mimas' number one restaurant, and when Kochanski had mentioned the waiter trap from The Great Gadsby, Britt had actually gone ahead and constructed one out of chairs, decorative plants and one tablecloth. They'd been thrown out, of course, but not before they'd herded in three waiters and had a banker fling a fillet mignon at them.  
   
That was the end of the fun part. After they'd hit the clubs, Britt had imbibed like a sponge, hit on everything with a pulse and talked way too much about his eight cars and three jacuzzis. Once he started on about how they should pick up that hot chick with the multi-coloured hair and get a room at a hotel, Kochanski was ready to call it quits. She had wanted to get back at Tim for cheating on her, sure, but there was a limit.  
She should have known what she was getting into, making a shore leave date with a cadet straight out of the Academy. Despite all the talk about officers and gentlemen, the Academy produced a steady crop of Britts.

"All right, stud, let's get you back to the ship," she told him when the rainbow-coloured girl actually started to show interest. She grabbed his arm and pulled him out of his seat. "We're leaving dock at 5 am, remember?"  
   
"So we've got, what, three hours? That's plenty of time," Britt insisted. The rainbow-girl accomplished a cute pout.  
   
"You want to be hung over for morning inspection?"  
   
"Yes?" Britt grinned, and damn, some part of Kochanski that liked lads to be lads did find that charming. Maybe... But no. She had more self-respect than that.  
   
She'd call him a hopper, she decided. Nobody could survive a hopper ride and still be drunk at the end of it. She'd catch a tube back herself.  
   
*  
   
Lister had had a quiet night so far. Sure, there was the residue of somebody's ear and a part of somebody else's liver on the hood of his hopper, but he hadn't personally been attacked yet, and it was already 3 am. For a Saturday night on Mimas, that was practically somnolent. He'd soon be on his way home, such as it was, if only his last fare could decide where he wanted to be taken -  or rather, if he would just spit it out.  
   
"Look, mate, I can take you to the red light dictrict,” he told the fare. “Just tell me that's what you want. I don't care what or who you do. I've seen it all."  
   
"Don't be absurd," the man scoffed. "I'm merely looking for a fine Mimasian restaurant. I'm sure it's around here somewhere."  
   
"You're not even going to pay me, are you?" Lister groaned. "You're one of those fares who make a guy drive around all over town and then run off at the last stop."  
   
"I assure you, my good fellow, that I am good for it." He could not have put more disdain in that sentence if he'd practiced it in front of a mirror, which for all Lister knew he had.  
   
"You decide where you want to go," Lister said and flicked on the 'free' light. "While you do that, I'm taking another fare." He pulled at the controls and the hopper hopped down two levels of stacked-up cars.  
   
"Oh, forget it," said the man as Lister scanned the crowd. "Just take me back to the docks."  
   
"Too late," Lister said. He'd just spotted a man in the white cadet's uniform waving at the hopper from among the crowd milling around on the narrow stretch of pavement. He hopped down another level and opened the passenger side door to Mimas' late night fumes. "Need a ride?" he called out.  
   
"Awesome," said the inebriated American. "I've never been in one of these things."  
   
"First time for everything," Lister said cheerfully. He wouldn't be surprised if it was the last. This particular hopper had busted springs, so it jolted the bones of anyone in it to the point of fracture at every hop. Lister hadn't had a chance to get his lad at the auto shop to take look at it yet, seeing as how he'd only nicked it earlier that evening. The American might lose his teeth if he didn't watch it. It would make it easier to pick his pocket while helping him out of the cab later on.  
The cadet was already climbing in the back and jostling for space with Fare #1, whose nostrils had flared indignantly to the point of caricature, when Lister noticed Her. "Take him to the docks," She instructed him. "Cadet Corporal Reid. He's stationed on the Red Dwarf. Ask around."  
   
She was absolutely beautiful. Not beautiful like people on magazine covers or supermodels or genetically engineered prostitutes, but beautiful as in the most beautiful girl in the world, objectively speaking. Lister blinked and focused and tried to say something suave, which came out as "Whoa-hey-oh-wha?"  
   
"Did you get that?" She leaned forward, looking concerned. She did “concerned” beautifully. Of course she did. "Docks, Jupiter Mining Corporation ship the Red Dwarf, Cadet Corporal Reid."  
   
"Got it," he said.  
   
"Good." She smiled, a bright kind of smile right on the edge of laughter, and Lister was done for. "Don't worry about making it a smooth ride. He's a big boy." She started to close the door. Lister caught it with a hand.  
   
"Hey, aren't you coming too?"  
   
"Not this time," she said. She was already stepping away, and then she was gone, just like that. Lister was left holding the door, staring after her. He hadn't even got her name.  
   
"Let's go," said Reid, drumming at the back of the driver's seat. "Since my date ain't gonna put out, I only have two and a half hours left to score tonight. There's this chick in supplies that I think has her eye on me, but I gotta move fast."  
   
"You're all class, mate," Lister said, turning back to the wheel. His heart was doing somersaults at the idea that She wasn't putting out for Reid. "What's Her name?" He had to ask.  
   
"The chick in supplies? Sharon, I think. They call her Shazza. What's up with that?"  
   
"No, I meant Her."  
   
"Who?"  
   
"Her." Lister realized he'd been using Capital Letters, and that these might not be audible to others. "The girl just now. The one you were with."

"Can we get a move on?" said Fare #1.  
   
"Oh, Krissie," said Reid. "Kristine Kochanski. Why?"  
   
"No reason," said Lister and pulled a lever.  
   
Krissie. He barely felt the first jolt when the hopper semi-crashed down on top of a hover truck, his mind still dwelling on Her. Reid fell over on the back, yelping out a profanity. The second one, which landed on a three-car pile-up, Lister registered even less.  
   
The next impact he did notice, but that was because it was a nose-first crash into a wall.

The hopper skidded out of control down towards the street. Gravity yanked the controls out of Lister's hands as the it bounced off a hovercar and into another. The hopper rolled madly and threw all three of them about the confined space as it hit a car pile, which shuddered and crashed in an ear-splitting clatter down into the traffic.  
   
Lister hit his head, and everything winked out.  
   
Then he was awake again, blinking at cracked windowpane above him. The clanging in his head resolved itself into the sound of a siren.  
   
"Smeg!" he cursed.

Security was on its way.


	2. Chapter Two

Arnold J. Rimmer found himself sitting up on a tatty old sofa in a half-lit room full of engine parts and power tools, staring into a cup of fragrant coffee with a leaf-pattern of cream in it, with no recollection of how he had got there or why the beverage in this place seemed so out of step with the general décor.  
   
The last thing he remembered was the hopper bracing for another jump, and then, leaf-pattern. The intervening period was simply gone.  
   
The back of his head throbbed with pain and his left leg felt like one big bruise. Also, his right pinkie was twisted at an odd angle. He tried moving it, and instantly decided that he didn't really need to use it that badly after all.  
   
This was some kind of a nightmare, wasn't it? Any time now the walls would start closing in on him or his father's head would pop out of the cup and start listing all the reasons why he wasn't fit to live, and then maybe some flesh-eating octopi would show up and start playing out his fear of homosexuality in some pornographic tentacle travesty. Business as usual.  
   
He looked around suspiciously. There was the smelly little cabbie from before holding an icepack to his head and sipping a can of beer by a mini-fridge on the other side of the room. That American cadet was bent over some papers spread on a table, his white jacket torn and smudged. Rimmer caught a glimpse of a blueprint. Next to him was a shorter man – one that Rimmer had never seen before.  
   
All he'd wanted was to lose his virginity to a kind lady of the night. He knew it wasn't ideal but at 31, he'd decided, it was about time. That was all! He should have been back on the Dwarf by now, none the worse for wear and minus one virginity! Instead he was stuck here, wherever this was, and...  
   
Panic struck him like a spray of cold chicken soup in the face. He checked his watch. The glass was broken and the little hand wasn't moving. "Hey," he called in the quivering, high-pitched voice , "does anybody know what time it is?"  
   
"You asked that five minutes ago," said the cabbie, taking off the icepack long enough to let Rimmer see the big yellow bruise on the left side of his face. "Are you all right, mate? You've been sort of out of it."  
   
"Were we in an accident?" Rimmer shook his head to clear it. "For God's sake, man. What time is it?"  
   
"5:30 the last time you asked." The cabbie checked his watch. "5:36 now."  
   
"Smeg!" Rimmer said, bouncing up off the sofa. "I'm supposed to be back on the Red Dwarf! The inspection started fifteen minutes ago."  
   
"The ship left dock thirty minutes ago," said the American, looking up from the papers on the table with a brilliant grin. Why was he grinning? Why would anyone grin? Wasn't he from the Dwarf too? Panic began to melt into that familiar sinking feeling of everything being absolutely awful with no hope of ever getting any better, so that even panicking was futile.  
   
 _"We've missed the ship?"_  
   
"Good riddance, if you ask me," said the American.  
   
The man had the gall to look happy despite the fact that he, too, seemed to be holding his arm at a funny angle. If debilitating pain and a hopper crash weren't enough to put this guy down, that was one thing, but... "Oh God. I had an astronavigation exam coming up!" He grabbed his head. "We need to report to the closest Space Corps office immediately. Maybe we won't be thrown out for desertion if we just explain that it was an accident!"  
   
"You're not reporting that crash to anyone," said the cabbie testily. "No way. You'll get me in trouble."  
"Should you be in trouble?" Rimmer shot back. "Is there something we should know about, hmm? Maybe your contraption was faulty and that's why we're in this mess. Well, mister, you aren't going to get away with it. I'll report you to security and you'll be done for." He was starting to feel better about this. If it was all this guy's fault, surely it couldn't be Rimmer's. "Do you know what they do to prisoners on this moon? I bet you're not going to like it. Serves you right. You could've got us all killed."  
   
"No."  
   
It was the fourth man in the room, the one Rimmer didn't recognize. He was apparently in his late twenties, fit and dressed in a metal worker's apron. He was also stupidly good-looking, with a quiet and effortlessly cool air. Rimmer hated him on sight.  
   
"Nobody goes to security," said the man. He spoke clearly but with an obvious accent.  
   
"Damn right," said the cadet – Reid, wasn't it? "We can't let our buddies here down, can we? We're all in the same boat. Dave here," he indicated the cabbie, "drives a not-entirely-legal hopper cab. Hey, these things happen. You do what you gotta do to make a buck, right Dave?" Dave just gave the man an amused glance, and went back to nursing his beer. "Kato here fixes hoppers and spider-cars and all sorts of totally cool stuff and he doesn't ask questions – fair enough too, right? And you and me, friend, we're on the lam from the Space Corps itself. We're all outlaws, so I figure we gotta help each other."  
   
"Oh God." Rimmer curled his lip, feeling nauseated. "I see it now. You're one of those rich bastards with nobby parents who get the whole world handed to them on a silver platter. You're given the best academy training while the family money greases all the wheels for you. You've got everything I've ever wanted in my whole life and you can't wait to throw it away for some romantic fantasy of being a lowlife criminal."  
   
Reid looked put out. "You don't have to put it quite like that."  
   
"I figure he's right," said Dave, pointing at Reid with his beer can. "You're gonna miss those silk sheets once you see how the other half really lives. Be better for me and me mate here if you two just forgot any of this ever happened and went back to Space Corps."  
   
Kato nodded his agreement and leaned back against the table.  
   
"That is precisely what I intend to do," Rimmer said, shaking a finger at Reid. "And when I do, I will report you for dereliction of duty, sir!"  
   
Kato frowned. Dave made a face. Reid squinted at him. Rimmer flared his nostrils at all three of them. "Right. Where's the exit?"  
   
Dave took a slow drink.  
   
"Well?"  
   
Reid crossed his arms.  
   
"You're not seriously going to stop me, are you?" Rimmer let out squeaky laugh. "Kidnapping Space Corps personnel--"  
   
"Then say you won't rat us out!" Dave insisted. "What you do with your own self is your business."  
   
"All right." Rimmer straightened up. "'I won't rat you out.' Now can I go?"  
   
The other three exchanged glances.  
   
Kato went over to the cupboard by the wall just as Reid and Dave advanced on Rimmer and pinned his arms behind his back. "What do you think you are you doing? You are going to be in so much trouble!" Rimmer cried out in pain as his injured pinkie was jostled in the process of his hands being forced behind his back. Kato had pulled a pair of handcuffs out of a drawer and was advancing on them. "How do you expect to get away with this? I know your faces! I know your names!"  
   
"That's not necessarily a smart thing to say when you're being kidnapped, is it?" said Reid conversationally as the steel snapped closed around Rimmer's right wrist.  
   
The familiar feeling of paralyzing fear trickled down Rimmer's back and he didn't resist when he was pushed, not unkindly, against a bare pipe running from the floor to the ceiling. This was really happening. He had been kidnapped by criminals and stranded on some God-forsaken trading moon. He was in pain. He could die.  
   
Dave hooked the cuffs around the pipe and snapped the second cuff closed around Rimmer's other wrist. He was trapped.  
   
Rimmer's eyes rolled back in his head and his body slumped against the pipe, unconscious.  
   
*  
   
"That's going to be a problem," Dave Lister said. "Sorry I brought him to you, Kato. I didn't realize he'd be such a smeghead."  
   
Maybe it was because he was still a little drunk and a lot high on adrenaline and freedom, but Britt wasn't worried. "I say we dump him by a Space Corps office here in the city. He won't know how to find this place. It's not like he has evidence."  
   
"Has our names," Kato said.  
   
"So?" Britt waved a hand. "He could have got them out of the phonebook."  
   
"We all have injuries matching his story," Dave pointed out.  
   
"That doesn't matter if they don't know where to come looking for us." Britt really did not see a problem here. "You think Mimas Security's going to go through every Kato and every Dave on Mimas just because some smeghead had a shitty night out? Come on!"  
   
"What about Britt Reid, stationed on Red Dwarf, rank Cadet Corporal?"  
   
"They're not going to find him if he's not on the Dwarf, are they? And I won't be."  
   
Kato crossed his arms. "Why you so interested in running away?" he asked. "You got money, a career."  
   
Britt shook his head. "I hate the Space Corps. Always did. I'm done there."  
   
"You say that now," Dave said jovially. The guy had a face made for laughing. "Wait 'til you've had a few nights sleeping on the streets surrounded by Bliss freaks."  
   
"I don't care!" Britt snapped. "It can't be worse than being stuck inside a ship being told what to do every goddamn minute. When to eat, when to shower. It's like the whole ship is your babysitter."  
   
Britt had been twenty years old when he'd entered the academy. He was twenty-eight now. Most of his classmates were two years younger, but Britt did not regret the difference. For two years, he'd done whatever he pleased. He'd dated a string of knock-out, wild girls, taken a stolen ship to the stratosphere and back, hung out with the craziest dudes and blown a whole lot of his dad's money on parties and toys. It had been the best time of his life.

When the old man had finally lain down the law, Britt had barely known what was happening before he found himself in a uniform, attending class after class about planetary policies, astronavigation and armed combat. Okay, so the combat part was pretty sweet, but day-to-day it was nothing but numbers and saluting and petty paper-pushing bullshit that hadn't suited him on his mellowest day.  
   
Britt had spent a lot of years trying to get kicked out or discharged in some way that might still keep him on the will. He'd long since given up actually trying to make his dad proud. That wasn't going to happen unless he suddenly turned into Captain America – and even then the bastard would probably tell him to 'stop prancing about in that ridiculous outfit and get a real job'.  
   
In the last year, he'd been stationed at the dullest over-sized mining ship – a mining ship! - making routine boring rounds around the same boring planets, always with Cadet Corporal Britt Reid doing the same boring calculations and personnel file upkeep that drove him up the wall. Maybe he hadn't slept and maybe he wasn't entirely sober yet and maybe three cups of coffee had been two too many, but he'd meant what he'd said. Screw the will. He was done.  
   
Dave said, "I wouldn't mind it for a few months if it took me back to Earth."  
   
"Mimas is a shithole," said Kato. "Wish I was back on Earth too."  
   
"Then let's go!" Britt nearly jumped in place. "I've got money. Loads of money! I'll just withdraw some cash and buy all of us tickets back home. It's the least I could do."  
   
Lister's eyebrows shot up towards his hairline. Kato looked intrigued. "You're serious?"  
   
"I am totally serious. My dad's going to be pissed off, but I've got my own account. Dave, I owe you for crashing that hopper. I count that as a turning point in my life. And Kato..." He turned to Kato, and hesitated. It was probably too early in their relationship to say, _You are totally awesome and I don't want to let you go because, holy shit, you design space ships, can we be BFFs?_ Yeah, way too early. "I owe you for the coffee. This coffee is fucking awesome. You've both earned your tickets, and besides, I just want to help you guys out."  
   
"You know what, that's not a bad idea," Lister said, playing with a lock. "If we leave dock soon enough after we dump this smegger..."  
   
"...They won't have time to even put a warrant out," Britt concluded with a grin. "Guys. This is going to work."  
   
*  
   
Chief Detective Miguel Chavez hated Mimas. All Mimas Security officers did. Even more, they hated the people on it – tourists, locals, they didn't care. It was an egalitarian kind of hate, natural-born in the sort of people who gravitated towards signing up for Mimas Security and amplified by constant exposure to endless, mind-numbing paperwork.  
   
Currently he was hating whoever had smashed that hopper into the wall, caused all that destruction of property and then legged it. The forensics droids were going over every inch of the vehicle's remains. If the guy was in his database, Chavez would find him and then exercise all possible outward expressions of his hatred on him.  
   
He hated Mimas and Mimasians, but sometimes he did love his job.  
   
"Did you get a description?" said the Case woman. Chavez hated her too.  
   
"Driver had some kind of a dreadlock ponytail thing going on," Chavez growled. He'd been told to cooperate with this bitch, but he wasn't going to go out of his way to look like he liked it. "Two white passengers -- looked like Space Corps, they say. They all left on their feet. We think they hopped on the back of a hovertruck. No way to prove it."  
   
"What about the hopper's security camera?"  
   
"Busted. But we have the driver registration."  
   
"That won't do you much good." She took off her sunglasses and surveyed the scene. Chavez didn't care much for feminine beauty even at a time like this when he was going through a dry spell in the bedroom department, but he had to admit she had a kind of showy glamour. It didn't make him like her any better.

She hunched down next to the broken hull of the hopper. "See this?" She pointed at a jagged hole, a burn mark and a bunch of cut wiring under the dashboard. "This hopper was stolen. I'll bet you anything the registered driver won't match any of your descriptions."  
   
"Smegging hell," Chavez swore.  
   
"Well." She stood up. "You have my number. Call me when you have the forensics results. No, scratch that – I'll come by the station later. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Detective Collins is interested." She slipped her sunglasses back on and turned away, clipping away down the pavement.  
   
Chavez whipped his head around to see Collins looking shyly up at him from behind his droid control station on the other side of the wreck.  
   
Well, damn.  
 


	3. Chapter Three

The Sääski auto repair shop was in a small two-story building situated not three blocks away from the red light district, on a narrow pedestrian alley. The top floor was divided between a workshop and lounge area and Mrs Pain's massage parlour — a spill-over from three blocks away. The place alternately stank of incense and over-applied perfume or oil fumes. The street level was dedicated to a narrow garage, only wide enough to allow two cars to park side by side.

Below street level there was the second garage.  
   
"Wow!" Britt gushed as Kato pulled a canvas off a sleek black hovercar. "Is that a Narayanan Imperial?"   
   
"With a few modifications." Kato glanced back at him, amused. The guy was like a kid in a candy shop – had been ever since he'd seen Kato's designs upstairs, though Kato doubted he'd understood what he was seeing. It made him want to show off a little.

Dave just watched them quietly from the door, lighting a cigarette. Kato ignored him. Let him judge all he wanted. Kato thought himself a good judge of character, and he figured Britt was okay.     
   
Kato walked around the car and pressed a button on his remote. The car rose a few inches and began to hum. "Electromagnetic shields." He pressed different button, and a nearly see-through glaze covered the car. "And then there is this." Another button, and the car shimmered and vanished, leaving only a slight distortion in the air between them and the back of the garage.  
   
"Holy shit, it's an invisible hover car!" Britt nearly jumped in place. "They only have that shit on the bigger military ships! Kato, this is so cool!"

"Hey, how come you never shown me any of this before?" Lister asked, looking around at the other canvas-covered lumps around the room and at the collection of partly cannibalized police hovercycles.   
   
Kato did not say, _If we weren't about to get out of Mimas, I'd be risking my neck bringing you guys down here._ Dave was asking too many questions already. Instead he shrugged and said, "They're not mine. I just work on them."   
   
"You did all this?" Britt walked around the hovercar, peering at the empty space from different angles. "You're a goddamn genius, Kato."   
   
Kato soaked it up, just a little. "Also swapped the engine for a lighter hover mechanism to make room for second engine – propulsion. Could take this baby into orbit."  

"Wow!"   
   
"But we're just taking it to the bank, right?" Lister asked.   
   
Britt was playing with the electromagnetic field. It singed him slightly every time, but he just licked his palm and touched it again.   
   
"Might as well go in style," Kato said. Besides, if they were leaving, he was going to miss this one. He could rebuild it, of course, but it wouldn't be the same. He typed the unlock code into the remote and the car appeared to re-materialize.   
   
"Does it have a name?" Britt asked, trying to peer inside the tinted glass windows.   
   
"It does."   
   
"Look." Lister clapped his hands together. "Let's go, all right? I don't know how long we can leave that smegger upstairs. Now or never — right, lads?”   
   
"Dave, I like you," said Britt seriously. "Kato, let's roll."   
   
*   
   
Arnold J. Rimmer, Bsc. Ssc., his face twisted in fierce concentration (with extra nostril flare and a kind of an unconscious sneer that made him look even more like an angry rodent than usual), was heroically attempting to pick his handcuffs with a screwdriver.   
   
He had it all thought out. As long as he could free himself and wait diligently just outside the door, he could take out his captors, cuff them right back and cart them off to the nearest Mimas Security station. It would mean instant redemption in the eyes of the Space Corps, and undying glory that would make even Mummy take notice.

So, of course, he was just going to jump out the window and run away. If he could just get that lock open...   
   
Fifteen minutes later, he was still trying, though he'd cut his fingers on the screwdriver and his pinkie was throbbing with pain. In his diaries, he decided, this event would be given the epic treatment it deserved, to accurately reflect the extent of his suffering.   
   
*   
   
"That's odd," Britt said, took the chip out and tried it again. Lister leaned over his shoulder to better see the screen.   
_Chip rejected_ , the screen said. _Please check your expiration date and contact your local bank office._  
   
The ATM was by the market, between a store selling android parts and another selling plastic surgery home kits. The crowd was pushing past their backs, jostling them in the never-ending Mimas crush. The hovercar hummed softly, parked above their heads.   
   
"Smegging hell," Lister moaned. "You said you had money!"   
   
"I do have money! I have loads of money!" Britt took his account chip out, shook it, swiped his thumb across the stripe and tried it again.   
   
 _Chip rejected._   
   
Britt punched the machine and took his chip back. "I don't get it. No way Dad could have frozen it already. Post doesn't even travel to Earth and back that fast."   
   
"Now what do we do?" Lister asked. "We're back to square one."   
   
As plans went, it had never been very well thought-out. Still, it wasn't every day you ran into a rich bloke who's willing to blow his savings on your ticket back home.   
   
Lister had been trying to get back to Earth ever since he'd found himself homeless on Mimas after a 25th birthday booze-up had ended up with him waking up on the Saturn moon wearing yellow waders and a lady's hat, with no clear memory of how he'd got there. It had turned out it wasn't easy 'making a buck' on Mimas when you had no papers and no skills. Back home on Earth he could at least ask for his old job at the grocery store back. He could see his granny, make some money. Maybe he could even mooch off Britt for a while and get some fancy gig from a rich mate of his. Something like finance or advertising. You didn’t need skills for those, right? He'd have a chance to become somebody a girl like Krissie Kochanski might go out with.

In any case, Britt knew her. He probably even knew her number.   
   
It was evidence of how far Lister had fallen that he actually considered getting a real job. He figured he needed one if he was going to be raising a large family. They were going to have at least two boys and a girl.   
   
"Guys," Kato's voice came from above. He was leaning out an open door of the car, and nudged his head towards the square. "Pigs."   
   
"Smeg!" Lister jumped up and grabbed the edge of he car just as Kato brought the car closer to the ground. The two of them scrambled in. "Where?"   
   
Kato pointed, and Lister followed his finger to a group of Mimas Security officers, instantly recognizable by their dark blue uniforms and by being a good head taller and a lot uglier than anyone else in the crowd. There were five of them, which meant they were planning on a group arrest – either someone they expected to be armed, or three or more people who might put up a struggle. That description definitely sounded familiar…   
   
"Should we do the cloaking thing?" Britt asked from the back seat.   
   
"People usually notice it when a car vanishes into thin air," Kato said. "Besides, they're heading away from us. Look."   
   
It was true. The contingent in dark blue was mowing through the crowd and towards one of the tourist cafés on the other side of the market place, a tiny hole in the wall with a reinforced transparent steel window and a friendly sign outside.

"Lister," said Kato, looking grim, "I think they're going after Squib the Frogger."   
   
"What the whatter?" Britt laughed.   
   
"He sells game viruses under the table..."   
   
"Yeah, whatever," said Britt. "So they're not coming after us. We still have no money. That kinda messes with the master plan. We need a new master plan!"   
   
"Squib's a friend," Kato muttered. "Sort of."   
   
"Well, it was worth a try." Lister sighed and leaned back against the smooth black leather. "At least if we're back in square one we haven't lost anything yet."   
   
The others didn't reciprocate with the murmur of agreement Lister had been expecting. He glanced back at Britt. "Space Corps starting to look better yet?"   
   
"Hell no," Britt said. He clapped his hand on Lister's shoulder and squeezed it manfully. "We'll figure something out, little buddy. We're three smart guys, aren't we?"   
   
"Guys."   
   
Lister turned to look at Kato. He was staring out across the square. There were bright flashes from Squib's café.   
   
"Smeg," Lister said sadly. He'd liked Squib.   
   
"This Squick--"   
   
"Squib."   
   
"He a good guy?" Britt asked.   
   
"As good as they get," Kato said. "Squib sells Better Than Life viruses, cheap enough to hurt himself sometimes. Gameheads have a chance of getting out of BTL if the program is infected, but it's illegal."   
   
"Then what are we waiting for, guys?" Britt shouted. "Let's go rescue him!"  

Lister laughed. "You're out of your smegging head. It's _Mimas Security_ , man. Just let it go."   
   
"Yeah, well, we have a sweet tricked-out N-Imp." Britt nudged Kato's shoulder. "We could do this -- right, Kato?"   
   
"It's not worth it!" Lister protested, but even as he spoke the car lifted higher. Kato steered it smoothly over the heads of the crowd and towards the café, stopping it just outside the shop. There was a double thunk as two laser cannons rose out of the Imperial's hood.   
   
"Yes!" Britt chortled.   
   
"Kato, what the smeg?" Lister shouted. He could see the one officer stationed outside the shop staring up at them with his mouth open. The bystanders, already pushed back as far as they could go, were climbing over each other to make more room between them and the officer's laser whip.   
   
Kato picked up a speaker. It took Lister a moment to recognize it, but when he did, it made perfect sense. Those gutted police hovercycles – Kato had been stealing and modifying security technology to trick out this car.  
   
Lister couldn't get caught at this, not now. How could he leave Krissie to raise three kids alone while he did time? Would she wait?   
   
"Officers, put your weapons down and step outside," Kato said into the speaker. Britt reached over from the backseat and tried to snatch it from him, but Kato pushed him back. "You have fifteen seconds before we open fire."   
   
The officer's face twisted into an animalistic snarl and he lifted his whip. It was a heavy duty laser whip, one that took years of practice just to avoid slicing off your own fingers, but in the hands of a master it was a fearsome weapon. It could cut through steel like butter. "Kato!" Lister screamed.   
   
Kato typed a code in a keypad and flicked a switch. The air around the car shimmered, there was a kind of twanging sound, and the world outside exploded into fire and glass.   
   
*   
   
Squib the Frogger was not having a good day. His wife had left that morning with the cash box, which in retrospect explained why the security had shown up before noon. They'd zoomed in on his stash of viruses under the counter within the first minute, but had then proceeded to wreck the rest of the place anyway. He'd been really proud of that mobile phone décor and the early 21st century prints, too. They'd given the place a nostalgic feel, but now all his Lady Gaga covers and the Rowan Fratricide publicity shots lay in pieces on the floor among shards of glass.   
   
"Name your suppliers," demanded the officer holding him by the collar in a surprisingly posh accent for someone who looked like a shaved gorilla. "We can do this the easy way, or we can take it back to the station and do it hard and long."   
   
"Uh." Squib squirmed. He was a skinny, tiny man and had used to be a skinny, tiny boy, and he knew how this worked. Whether he gave it up or not, he was still going to get thrashed and humiliated. What was the point? "You'll never make me talk, coppers," he said in a resigned voice.   
   
The officer grabbed his collar tighter, making him wheeze. Right then, a crackly, amplified voice called from outside. _"Officers, put your weapons down and step out of the establishment."_  
   
Squib couldn't believe it. He could just make out a dark shape hovering outside the reinforced glass, beyond the wreckage that used to be his café. He knew that voice. "Kato?" he said in astonishment.   
   
The officer's focus snapped back to him. "Who is Kato?"   
   
"No one," Squib tried.   
   
The officer took out his laser whip, set it to stun, and tapped it lightly against Squib's leg.   
   
The pain was indescribable. For a moment, it was all there was, the world swallowed up into a sensation that was everything wrong. He knew it was starting to end only when he noticed himself screaming.

"Want some more of that, hmm?" the officer asked.   
   
"No." Squib sobbed. Big fat tears were running down his cheeks. He was over, done for. What did it matter?   
   
 _"Who is Kato?"_  
   
Squib swallowed. His mouth was dry and it tasted like electricity. The officer raised his whip.


	4. Chapter Four

The café's wide street-side window lay in partly melted shards on the street and on the tables just inside. Officers were picking themselves up or curled on the ground in pain. One wasn't moving at all.   
   
Lister didn't particularly care if the man was dead or not. You didn't waste your sympathy on Mimas Security. You could argue it wasn't their fault, it was just the way they were raised and brainwashed by the establishment, but in the end of the day they were evil smegging goits to a man. What Lister was worried about was the fact that they were evil goits with laser whips and every reason in the world to want to slice them to pieces. That, and the fact that Kato was driving the car through the window inside the trashed café where recovering officers were in a prime position to do just that. Then Kato was opening the door and jumping out of the car, which was funny, really, because Lister had always assumed Kato was sane.   
   
"Come on!" Kato said to Squib, who was lying dazed in the ruins, half covered by an unconscious cop. Squib stared at him with wide eyes and then took his hand. As he did, a crackling beam of light lassoed through the air towards the two of them.   
   
What happened next went by almost too fast to register. Kato did some kind of a duck-and-spin movement and then a broken picture frame was flying through the air. The officer with the whip fell over just as the whip-beam flickered and died. The next thing Lister knew, Kato was shoving Squib into the car and climbing up behind him.   
   
"Reverse it!" Kato shouted. The door closed behind him, cutting off shouts and the crackling of whips coming to life. Lister scooted to the driver's seat just as Squib stumbled on the back, took a guess with the controls, and bumped the car in the wall. Kato reached over him to turn on the shields just in time for them to bounce off two simultaneous whiplashes. On the third go, Lister cleared the building and steered directly for the sky, up above the reach of the security's long-range back-up rifles.   
   
"That was awesome!" Britt was gushing. "Did you see that, Dave?"   
   
"Cloak it and drive south," Kato ordered.   
   
"I don't know how!" Lister held up his hands. The dashboard ahead of him was full of blinking lights, switches and Chinese characters.   
   
Kato leaned over him again and flicked a switch. A digital image of the car on one of the screens blinked green. "Move over."   
   
"Kato, what's going on?" came Squib's quivering voice from the backseat.   
   
"Don't worry, we're taking you to safety," said Britt happily, patting Squib's shoulder.   
   
"But my shop!"   
   
"Already lost it," Kato said as he steered the invisible hovercar closer to the rooftops and skipped around them towards the red lights. "And you would have been in jail cell soon."   
   
"I suppose that's true," Squib said. "Do you know what Macy did? Took my money and tipped off the cops! I knew she wanted a divorce, but I never expected this."   
   
"Man, that's rough," said Britt. Lister doubted he had any idea what he was talking about. Based on what he'd heard him say about Krissie and the 'chick' in supplies, long-term relationships probably weren't Britt's thing. "You're one of us now, Squib. We're a gang of outlaws!"   
   
"Whoa, hey," Lister said. "I'm not an outlaw. I'm just a regular bloke. I was a trolley attendant back home in Liverpool. Security doesn't even have anything on me."   
   
"You don't have to be ashamed of being a thief," Britt said. "I'm not ashamed of being a deserter. I bet Kato here isn't ashamed of being an awesome vigilante kicking the shit out of the corrupt establishment."   
   
Kato gave a thoughtful nod, apparently conceding Britt's point.   
   
Lister's heart sank. Winning Krissie's hand was going to be difficult if, instead of getting introduced to her as a decent, up-and-coming sort of bloke by an influential, law-abiding heir to a fortune, he ended up being just some criminal nutter's drinking buddy. Lister remembered now why he'd never tried to make anything of himself. It was too much hard smegging work, worrying about how other people saw him. "Look," he tried. "None of us want to go to prison, right?"   
   
"Right," said Squib,   
   
"I guess," said Britt.   
   
"So let's not make it easy for them. There's got to be some way to get off Mimas. Maybe you can call your bank, Britt. Or Kato, we can swap one of your hovercars for tickets."   
   
Britt's eyes lit up. "Or rob a bank."   
   
"No! No robbing banks!" Lister yelped, then considered for a while. They did have a car with the firepower of a small military ship. "At least not unless we have to," he amended. "But, look. Let's just get back to the auto shop, check on the smegger and think of something, all right?"   
   
"You can't go back," Squib said in a small voice.   
   
"We just need to get those tickets," Lister continued. Kato steered the hovercar around a building and swiftly uncloaked it as it slipped into the traffic. "That's all, and we're in the clear. They only saw Kato for two minutes, right?"   
   
"Guys," Squib tried. "I'm really sorry..."   
   
"What, Squib?" Lister said impatiently, twisting around to look at the man crouched in the corner of the back seat. Squib was a good guy, but he wasn't a mate, exactly. He was just one of those guys who hung around and tried to be helpful in a mildly annoying way.

When you were a petty criminal on Mimas, you had to network. Lister stole hoppers and sometimes cars, drove them around as taxis and made some modest money out of that. When he was done he brought them to Kato for parts, who in turn filed off registration numbers and did some maintenance on all his new rides. The Sääski Auto Repair Shop made illegal modifications on cars that were driven by dealers and gangsters, who in turn supplied Squib, who sometimes came to Lister for a discreet ride between BLT addict cribs and care centres. Afterwards, they'd all go for a lager. Squib was usually rat-arsed after two and had to be carted back to Macy before the drinking could start in earnest.   
   
He now looked like the morning after five lagers and a night spent in the gutter. That wasn't good. "Are you all right?" Lister asked.  
   
The car slid smoothly among the traffic and turned a corner to the side street with Sääski's auto shop. It looked as quiet as any Mimas street ever did, which was to say wall-to-wall with people and two separate fights breaking out along its short length.   
   
"I, I, I don't think it's safe here," Squib said nervously.   
   
The guy had the backbone of a tapeworm. "Relax, mate," Lister said with a grin. "Look, it's fine. It's quiet, isn't it?"   
   
The garage door opened with the touch of a remote and Kato drove down the ramp into the basement. Everything was quiet. Switching the light on did not reveal looming figures with guns waiting for them.   
   
"Where is Sääski, anyway?" Lister asked as the hovercar's doors hissed open. Maybe Squib was getting to him.   
   
"He has business," Kato said on a tone that meant no further questions would be appreciated.   
   
"So he won't mind if we bunk here for a while, then?"   
   
Kato gave him a sharp look. "He'll be back tomorrow. This isn't a hotel."   
   
"Better than my usual bunk," said Lister, who slept in a luggage locker at the station. "Besides, those two are already taking advantage of the premises." He pointed at the back seat. Squib was sitting back with his mouth slack, and Britt was curled up against the window glass, snoring gently.   
   
Kato peered at the sleeping figures, then reached over and poked Squib. Squib didn't move. Kato poked him again. No response. Lister reached back and shook Squib. Nothing. He pressed two fingers on his throat, just below his jaw.   
   
"He's fainted," Lister said, surprised.   
   
Kato rounded the car and pulled Squib out. The little man was so light it posed him no challenge to hoist him over his shoulder.

When poked, Britt just curled up tighter and muttered something about a pool. Kato figured they might as well leave him alone. "Let's just get Squib upstairs."   
   
*   
   
The kettle whistled to announce the water was hot. Lister poured the steaming liquid into a yellow plastic cup, on top of a small bag of some ridiculous red berry tea Kato had recommended before disappearing back down into the basement.   
   
"It's about time," said Rimmer. "I'm parched." He was still handcuffed to the pipe. He'd been asleep when Lister had returned, and since then he'd barely stopped berating him long enough to draw breath. Lister wouldn’t have blamed Rimmer if he were anyone else, but the man had an obnoxious nasal voice that grated on every one of Lister's nerves.   
   
He did his best to ignore the man and walked over to where Squib was propped up on the sofa, moaning softly. "Come on, then, mate," he coaxed. He wafted the tea under Squib's nose. "Wake up, eh?"   
   
"Hey!" Rimmer shouted. "What about me? You chain me up like an animal, disappear for hours..."   
   
"It was more like half an hour."   
   
"...Leaving me here, where anything could happen... What if I had a medical emergency? If I died due to your willful neglect, that would make you a murderer, my friend! Think about that!"   
   
Lister gave the man a rueful smile. "I think we've established that I'm not your friend, mate,"   
   
"Nor I your mate." Rimmer sniffed. "You could give me a cup of tea, though, you know. Just one teeny tiny cup. Would that kill you?"   
   
"I suppose not." Lister sighed. "He doesn't seem to want it, anyway." Squib moved and moaned and curled in on himself, but wouldn't revive enough to drink.   
   
There was just one problem. "Um." Lister looked up and down the pipe.   
   
"Well, there's a simple solution," Rimmer pointed out. "Uncuff me."   
   
"No way," Lister said.   
   
"Well, you're not going to pour it in my mouth," Rimmer said. "Don't even think about it. You'd spill it all over me. I know how these things go."   
   
"What way is that?" Lister asked, stalling for time. He really didn't fancy the idea of letting the fellow loose, but he didn't exactly want him dehydrated either, especially after he'd just been in an accident and hit his head.  
   
"Whichever way is the worst possible outcome for me," said Rimmer with a frustrated sigh. "The story of my life is enough to convince the most die-hard atheist that the universe was, in fact, set up to personally inconvenience me."   
   
"So it's all about you, then, is it?" Lister asked. "Everything that happened to me, ever since I was a little baby, was just so I could show up in your life and spill tea on you?"   
   
"Why not? What nobler goal do you think your life could serve? You're a dirty, lousy, grimy, smelly street rat, aren't you? You might as well only exist to spill tea on people."   
   
Lister could hardly believe his ears. The man was the most obnoxious creature he'd ever met, and Lister had always thought he had a fairly high threshold when it came to calling people obnoxious. The man was the ultimate in smegheadedness. If Lister had known who Plato was, he might have called him an approximation of the Platonic ideal of a smeghead.   
   
"Davey?" came Squib's weak voice from the sofa. Lister turned in time to see him sit bolt upright, his eyes wide. "We're at the auto shop!"   
   
"Yeah," Lister agreed. "Want some tea?"   
   
"We have to get out of here," Squib said. "Right now."  

"You keep saying that. Why?"   
   
Squib's face twisted in anguish. "Because I told security where Kato works."   
   
 _Smeg._  
   
Lister swallowed. "How soon do you think--"   
   
The window exploded in a burst of plastic shards.


	5. Chapter Five

First thing when he got back downstairs, Kato checked up on the man sleeping on the backseat of the hovercar. He didn't think Britt was about to wake up and go joyriding with the N-Imp or one of the bikes, but he didn't want to rely on that assumption, either. The guy seemed to be missing some basic behaviour inhibitors.   
   
Kato liked that.   
   
Kato had been on Mimas for nearly two years now. The neighbourhood he'd left for it, south of Coke City on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, wasn't much better, even if it wasn't much worse either. At least there you had the sense that the slum had an edge to  it, somewhere to escape to. Mimas was just Mimas, all the way around and in every direction.   
   
The chop shop job had been everything he'd wanted, up until the moment he realized that anything truly remarkable that he could engineer was no use to Sääski. No, what his boss wanted was parts that could be installed in dull, run of the mill cars that were going to break down in two months and have to come back for more repairs. What art Kato could bring to it, Sääski didn't want. It was all about the money. Kato was sick of it. He'd be doing better work back home mixing bootleg medicines and trading them for food and materials. He'd been nursing his malaise with side projects and alcohol and a few flimsy friendships, but he'd known for a while that it was time to go. In that sense, Britt showing up with his promise of money that may or may not materialize was just the kick he'd needed.   
   
He was actually surprised that it had taken this long. He was usually run out of town before a year was up. Trouble just had a way of finding him, and then it would be all car chases and dodging bullets, before life settled into another stretch of monotony. Maybe that was why he'd felt the need to blow up a café and hit a security goon in the face. It would all have seemed too easy otherwise. It still did.   
   
Britt was sleeping soundly, snoring slightly with a trickle of his spit pooling on the pleather seat, so Kato went to the back of the room, found the door and the staircase behind it, and made his way down into the sub-basement. He switched on the light and stood back for a moment to admire the sight.   
   
The sub-basement was, in fact, an abandoned underground railway station. It was easily three times the size of the building above in both height and width, with a tunnel of almost equal width leading away in both directions. One end, Kato knew, now ended at the bottom of an artificial pool of the Mimas Public Park – a misleadingly named exclusive area for official events - some five miles away, while the other ended in the reinforced wall of a department store's storage area. Everything was still there, though chipped and decayed, from the automatic ticket booths and plastic and metal gates to the railway area and the garish ad posters covering the walls.   
   
Taking up most of the space, propped up on four spindly landing legs, was the spaceship.   
   
*   
   
Britt concentrated. Blue wire or red? If he didn't dismantle the bomb built inside this green robot bikini girl in the next fifteen seconds, they'd all be done for.   
   
"Please hurry," said the robot girl, looking at him over her shoulder. The skin of her back was stretched open to reveal the black magic eight ball bomb wrapped up in wires and firmly attached to her machinery.   
   
But wait, was that a purple wire--?   
   
There was an explosion.

But that was impossible. He still had a whole ten seconds left on the counter.   
   
There was another rumbling, a sudden noise, and in another few seconds Britt was wide awake. He picked himself up out of the backseat. There was a pattering sound on the roof as a violent smash on the ceiling dropped bits of it onto the hovercar.   
   
"Kato?" Britt called out loudly. He kicked open the hovercar door and dropped on the floor. Combat training, combat training, how did this go again? Get out of a collapsing building, find shelter. Spot your fellow soldiers if possible. No heroics.   
   
Screw 'no heroics'. "Kato?" he called again. He couldn't see anyone else in the garage. "Shit."

He could either take the car outside and try to pick the guys up from upstairs or run up the stairs and bring them down. Was this even a combat situation, or more like a burst boiler situation?   
   
There was the unmistakable sound of machine gun fire from upstairs. That answered that.   
   
A door he hadn't noticed before slammed open at the back of the room. Training and instinct took over, and Britt rolled behind the hovercar and reached at his waist for a gun that wasn't there.   
   
"Britt, it’s me," came Kato's voice, and Britt relaxed. "What happened?"   
   
"No idea, but it's still happening!" Another smattering of ceiling fell on them. "We need to get the others!"   
   
"Get in the car," Kato ordered, and Britt obeyed. Kato crossed the room in two bounds and slipped into the driver's seat. A few seconds later they were flying up the ramp towards the slowly opening garage door.   
   
Behind it, the throng outside the auto shop had turned dark blue.   
   
Kato flicked the switch just in time, and the security goons were left looking confusedly at each other for orders on what to do about this suddenly open door, or maybe wondering why there had been that odd rumbling breeze rushing just over their heads.   
   
The invisible car hovered in midair above head height. Britt peered at the street below, and then up. "Jesus," he breathed. Kato was gripping the steering so hard his knuckles were white.   
   
Above them, three security squad cars hovered in the air, and above them the sky was darkened by a small shuttle. That is, the shuttle was small for a shuttle - it was still three times the size of the cars put together. It covered the roof of the building, while the squad cars crowded around the top floor window like vultures come to feast. Out here Britt could hear a woman screaming, probably one of the masseuses.   
   
"These guys don't mess around," Britt observed in a hushed tone.

Smoke curled up towards the sky. It didn't look good for Dave and Squib if they were still upstairs. From this angle, it was impossible to assess the damage done to the top, but it looked like at least a part of the wall around the street-side window had come down.   
   
Britt thought about it. With surprise on their side, they could probably take down the two bottom squad cars before the fuzz knew what hit them. If they zipped up fast enough while invisible they could still surprise the third one too, but the shuttle was bound to have sophisticated sensors installed.   
   
“Big boss would still toast us," said Kato, completing the thought.   
   
"Yes," Britt said, astonished. "Yes, exactly."   
   
"So we take boss out first." Britt could see a faint smile ghost over Kato's lips, and then gravity nailed him on he back of the seat as the N-Imp zigzagged around the squad cars and the shuttle up towards the red sky, then turned back to face them below. "Watch this," Kato said, and did something complicated and numerical on a keypad.   
   
There was a kind of a ‘whoomp’ sound. The air seemed to vibrate and expand under them. Britt glued his nose on the window to see the vibration travel downwards below them and engulf the shuttle. The shuttle shuddered, there was a brief drilling alarm sound, which cut short.

The massive vehicle's engine died. It seemed to hover in place just a fraction of a second more, as if caught on slow motion film, before it came crashing down. One squad car spun away under the impact and crashed into the building on the opposite side of the street, tearing into metal and masonry. The other two were squashed into pieces on the ground as officers on the street climbed over each other to get away. The sound was so loud Britt half-expected that it would blow them backwards into the sky.   
   
"Electronic jammer," Kato said, breathing out. "Would never have worked if their shields were up. Took a chance."   
   
Britt quickly picked his jaw off the floor. "Yeah, well, you would have looked pretty stupid if they had, wouldn't you?"   
   
Kato's eyes swiveled to him and then back to the wheel, and he frowned.   
   
"Well, what are you waiting for?" Britt demanded. "Let's go get Dave!"   
   
"Right." Kato drove the car down on the level of the second floor. The window and part of its frame was gone. Crumbled chunks of masonry were scattered inside and the wall was perforated with bullet holes. The little room with its kitchenette, tatty sofa, open piping and engine parts was in shambles, melted iron and broken pottery littering the floor. One bookcase still miraculously stood among the wreckage, with a single unbroken teacup still standing on the third shelf. There was no sign of Lister, Squib or the smeghead.   
   
"Great," Britt muttered. "Now what?"   
   
There was the sound of sirens and the purr of distant engines. Kato switched on another green screen in the car's massive dashboard, which showed a faint outline of the streets and a radar grid. Dots with Chinese characters next to them popped up on it. There were a lot of them. Britt didn't need to read Chinese to know that was bad news.   
   
"No time to try and find them on foot," Kato said, once more answering Britt's unvoiced thought. They made such a great team, Britt thought fondly. They could really be something. Kato and Reid. Reid and Kato. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, only cooler, or like one of those old superhero team-ups, the Blue Beetle and... whatever the sidekick's name was. It would be totally sweet.   
   
He was developing another man crush, wasn't he? He really needed to stop doing that.   
   
"Can't do it," Kato was saying. "Britt?"   
   
"Huh?"   
   
"We have to go."   
   
“Yeah, yeah.” Britt pulled himself together. "Regroup, right? And figure things out."   
   
"Last time we tried that, you fell asleep," Kato pointed out.   
   
"Come on, Kato, let's go!" Those red dots were getting awfully close to the green one in the middle. Britt thought he could even hear the roar of an engine much larger than the shuttle.   
   
Kato clicked his tongue and veered away and up. As the car rose over the tops of the roofs and sped across the red Mimas sky, Britt could see a sub-orbital ship rumbling towards the scene of the disturbance, its shuttles spinning around it like cubs around a mother wolf, each one as heavy and nasty and practical as its brother.   
   
Mimas Security. These guys showed up in every textbook under badass smeggers that no sane person would want to fuck with. If they had Dave and Squib, they were keeping them.


	6. Chapter Six

The Mimas security station for sector 4.01.76 was built three stories underground and three above, and every level was as grey, fortified and soul-sucking as the rest. They even had waiting room tables littered with boxes of safety procedure leaflets and gardening magazines from three decades ago. Who read paper magazines anymore? Who gardened on Mimas? Even weeds wouldn't grow here.  
   
Lenore Case stood in a cramped grey corridor next to a window through which she could see the forensic technicians bent over microscopes and keyboards in a small, crowded laboratory. Officer Collins stood by, his face easily distinguishable from any other in the building by the faint daze of happiness printed all over it. She let him zone out while she browsed through the results on an e-pad.  
   
Forensics had put this through faster than she'd expected. She congratulated herself that it was a thank-you for the matchmaking service from Collins. It was hard to imagine this kind of work used to take weeks, not hours, even prioritized.  
   
The genetic material had yielded seven full different profiles. She focused on the ones that had been constructed from a blood sample, as those were more likely to have been involved in the accident, at least theoretically. Each profile showed a projection aged up to about 30. None were Britt Reid. She flipped through the others, and was not surprised when she found him among the remaining skin cell projections. Her tracker had seen him enter the hopper and the security cameras from the street never showed anyone getting out before the crash.

It was a shame the tracker she had so cleverly installed in Britt's arm a few months ago during a routine medical had been smashed in the accident, but then again, this was what she was paid for – to do the finding when technology couldn't.  
   
Finding him among the profiles told her nothing new. What she needed was the information of the driver and the other passenger. Britt Reid wasn't local, so unless he willingly showed up at a Security station or a Space Corps outpost, she'd have very little to go on, trying to guess where he would go. It wasn't too far-fetched to assume he'd stick with the others from the crash, so she could start with their usual haunts.  
   
DNA couldn't tell you what kind of a hairdo a person had, if he was overweight, short or tall, but the facial projections tended to be spot-on. There was one profile that fit the description of the driver. The sample had been blood, so forensics had also been able to determine a probable age between twenty-three and twenty-seven.  
   
It was odd DNA. Her gaze lingered on the readouts that suggested inbreeding without any sign of its usual negative effects, but she clicked away soon enough and moved on to the next person on file. She wasn't here to look for genetic anomalies.  
   
There was the sound of a scuffle and approaching footsteps from an adjoining corridor. "Where are you taking me?" came a haughty voice with an edge of panic to it. "I keep telling you, I have nothing to do with these criminals. Will you let me go, already! I'm with the Space Corps!"  
   
"Yeah, a deserter. We know."  
   
Lenore looked up curiously as the voices approached the corridors' intersection.  
   
"Unwillingly! I was kidnapped! I was kept from returning to duty by Cadet Corporal Britt Reid!"  
   
The group marched into her line of sight. Lenore saw a glimpse of a sandy-haired, handcuffed man in a Space Corps uniform being dragged down the corridor by both arms by two officers. She glanced quickly down on the dull-eyed face of the DNA projection she'd just pulled off the e-pad. It was him.  
   
Lenore ran after them.  
   
*  
   
Kristine Kochanski had been called to the fixed phone line of the Space Corps Station in Sector 4.01.80 around midday. That was twenty minutes after one of the people arrested in the disastrous operation in 4.01.76 had been identified as wearing Red Dwarf insignia.  
   
By all rights she should have been on board the Red Dwarf right now, continuing her dull but career-enhancing stint as a navigation officer in charge of lesser asteroid monitoring. She blamed herself. If she'd made sure Britt Reid had been back on duty and on time by escorting him to the ship herself, the financing department would not have been short one officer, and the truancy officer would not have been assigned to take over his spot, and his job, then, would not have trickled down to the junior navigation officer. But she hadn't, and so here she was.  
   
Here was at a junior administrator's office at a Mimas security station, one of the places – she was beginning to realize – that she least wanted to ever spend another minute in.  
   
"Then there are forms 32b and 46f," said the junior administrator, a youngish, chubby ginger in a checkered shirt. He handed over an e-pad. "They're to apply for clearance."  
   
"I need to apply for clearance? Why?"  
   
"So we can tell you whether we have your truants in custody or not." The man rolled his eyes slightly, and then tried to cover it with a quick dry smile.  
   
"Um, I see," she said, putting the e-pad down on the table. "Tell you what, why don't I just give you a list of names? You can check the list, and if anybody on it is in your lock-up, you can just send them my way. How's that?"  
   
"What, you don't think he paperwork is important, is that it?" said the junior administrator. "Listen, lady. If the paperwork is not up to scratch, nothing is. And then whose ass is on the line? Mine. That's right. And not just mine. Do you realize what Mimas would be like if the security service descended into chaos? Can you? Forms 32b and 46f, _please_. Ma'am."  
   
Kochanski forced a smile and accepted the e-pad. Both forms were four flip-pages long and filled with tiny text, multiple selections, open fields, and requests for various official papers as attachments.  
   
 _All right, Krissie_ , she told herself, _keep calm_ . That worked for about half a page. "But I didn't bring my birth certificate!" she cried out loud.  
   
"Well, I guess you'll have to go back and get it then, won't you?" The man raised his eyebrows.  
   
Kochanski lowered the e-pad for a moment, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She barely reached the end of the breath before it turned into a snort of laughter. The whole situation was just funny, when you thought about it. Besides, Space Corps was paying for her stay on Mimas for at least another two weeks while she waited for a connection to the Dwarf's next stop. What was her hurry?

"All right," she said at last. "Could we go through the entire application process just one more time? I want to make sure I'll have everything ready next time."  
   
She might have been mistaken, but the junior administrator looked almost impressed. "All right, but just once more," he said indulgently. She flicked on her recording device as he began, jotting down the form numbers on the side of 32b.  
   
"You might want to talk to that other lady," he added after he'd finished recounting the procedure. "She had all her papers ready first time coming in." Now Kochanski was sure she detected a note of admiration.  
   
"What other lady? Was she Space Corps?"  
   
"No, private sector," said the junior administrator. "Got to fill out even more forms when you're private sector."  
   
"Like a private detective?"  
   
"More like covert security detail," came a voice from behind Kochanski.  
   
She turned to see a tall woman in her late thirties in the doorway, wearing a neat blue suit that matched her eyes and her blond hair swept up in a slightly retro bun. The woman moved forward with her hand extended. "Sorry, the door was open. Hi, I'm Lenore Case."  
   
Case had a great smile, like she'd known you forever and was glad to see you again. Kochanski found herself taking the offered hand and mumbling her own name.  
   
"Hi, Kang," Case said to the junior administrator, waving at him. "They still haven't got you that health chair?"  
   
"Still haven't," said Kang placidly.  
   
"Bastards." Case turned back to Kochanski. "Are you the Red Dwarf truancy officer? I asked at the desk out front, I hope you don't mind."  
   
"I am…well, technically I'm not, but... Let's just go with yes. How--"  
   
"It's kind of embarrassing, actually, but I was hired to keep an eye on Britt Reid by his father. Case Agencies." She handed Kochanski a simple, professional card with a readable contact chip on the side. "I was never meant to interfere with him, but to keep him, uh, safe."  
   
Right. You didn't have to be a genius to fill that in, not if you'd ever met Britt Reid. "Keep him more or less on the straight and narrow, you mean. Make sure he shows up for his shift, that sort of thing."  
   
"Yeah. Oops, right? So now I'm trying to find him, just as you are. Want to pool our info?"  
   
"Considering I have none, yeah, that would be good." Kochanski laughed.  
   
"I kind of owe Space Corps a report, anyway, since it's become a missing persons case. I should thank you for not wringing my arm." She winked at Kochanski, and turned to Kang. "Is there any rule against my sharing my clearance level with a colleague?"  
   
Kang's eyes swivelled between them. He picked up an e-pad and browsed through it for a moment. "Strangely, no," said Kang, frowning. "Doesn't even have a clarifying paragraph for the legal definition of colleague. Is there a page missing here?" He flipped back and forth between pages, looking puzzled and muttering, "D, then SX, Mac, E, Na... No paragraph... Odd."  
   
"Good! Then let's go, partner," Case said. "Britt Reid's not here, but I know they have at least one of your guys."  
   
Kochanski could see no reason to argue.  
   
*  
   
"Wow," said Britt.  
   
Kato said nothing. He was floating the car, shields up, high above the traffic, going nowhere in particular. It gave them time to think.  
   
It was late noon, less than ten hours since he'd picked up Lister, Britt and the dazed Rimmer a block away from the crash site, and it was pretty clear by now that he was going to leave Mimas the way he'd left every other city. "It's going to be fine," he said, to himself as much as Britt.  
   
He was getting a little hungry, though. Eventually, they'd have to sleep. And they needed a way off the moon.  
   
"I hate to say this, but we may have to bail." Britt looked grim. "Man, I liked Dave, but soldiers fall. It wasn't my fault. Was it my fault?"  
   
Kato opted for kindness. "I don't think it was your fault."  
   
"I could pay for his lawyers, maybe, if we can get the chip to work. So much for being an outlaw. They can't get us for this, though, can they? I mean, you and me?"  
   
"They'll get our names out of Squib, if not Dave," Kato reasoned. "I know I have to blow this town. Don't know about you. How good are those lawyers?"  
   
"Well, I'm not leaving you, buddy," Britt swore. "We're in this together. Compadres to the end. Like Xena and Gabrielle. Or Romeo and Juliet."  
   
"Romeo and Juliet?" Kato gave him an amused look.  
   
"Yeah, you know, fighting pirates and shit."  
   
"Ah. Pirates. Of course."  
   
"I just wish we could bust Dave out, too. I feel like I owe that to him." Britt lay back against the backseat with a sigh.  
   
Kato thought for a moment. Security was so bound in paperwork and rules that there was only one place they could have taken Lister and Squib - the sector station. He went through the materials at their disposal in his head. The car. Britt. Himself.

"Okay," he said at last.  
   
"Okay?" Britt asked. "What do you mean, okay?"  
   
Kato started to grin. "Let's bust them out."  
 


	7. Chapter Seven

Lister had been fingerprinted at a clerk's office along with Squib and Rimmer, who never paused in his tirade against the others. That had been the last Lister had seen of them. He'd been marched through a featureless corridor to a featureless holding cell by featureless guards who answered no questions and said nothing that didn't sound like it came straight out of the rulebook. He'd been left there for nearly a half an hour, and then he'd been marched to an interrogation room. That was nearly another half-hour ago. If this was what getting busted was like, it wasn't that bad --unless you were worried about being bored to tears.  
   
Of course, it could be that. That could be their strategy. A man could go crazy, caught between the same four walls day after day, month after month or even year after year. Was he even going to get a trial?  
   
Technically, all he'd done was steal a few hoppers and drive them without a license. Back home, that would meant a fine, or community service if you couldn't pay. Mimas? Who knew. The security didn't operate on the principles of law, justice or fair punishment. It was more like the code of the schoolyard bully. You look at them the wrong way, you get punched in the face. They're not looking tough enough recently, you get punched in the face. They're bored or did badly on a test or they wanted your lunch – you guesed it, more face-punching. Mimas security was that bully, but a bully with the h most expensive toys of all commerce moons. They managed it because their security personnel were ruthless and corrupt enough to arrest any local authority brave enough to suggest the tax money could be better spent elsewhere.  
   
In short, Lister was screwed, likely for good. If there was any hope, it lay in bureaucracy. If Mimas security got tied up with enough red tape, they'd either just hold him indefinitely - preferable to hard labour, anyway - or decide he was too much trouble and let him go. Maybe.  
   
Lister wasn't ready to give up. If for no other reason, he deserved to live because he was in love. That was a cardinal rule, wasn't it? A hero in love couldn't die without ever even getting on a first name basis with his true love, could he?

Lister sat back with a sigh on the uncomfortable metal chair that, aside from the table, was the only piece of furniture in the room. Who was he kidding? Lister knew he wasn't even the romantic sort of outlaw. There was a big difference between Robin Hood and the guy with two-week old grease stains on his T-shirt who drives a stolen cab for a living.  
   
He couldn't help it, though. He was in love. He could almost see her looking at him now, delicate eyebrows drawn together in confusion, dark hair waving around her pale face, behind the plexiglas window of the interrogation room's door. Oh, Krissie.  
   
Wait.  
   
She _was_ standing behind the plexiglas window. Lister stared at her, bug-eyed. She turned her face and spoke to someone outside, and the key turned in the lock. Lister sat up and brushed himself down as best he could, tucking his trouser pockets back in.  
   
"Hello," she said as she stepped into the room. She was watching him curiously. He could almost see her think. (She did that so well.) "Remember me, Mr Lister?" she asked, laughing. "We met in the small hours this morning."  
   
Okay, man, just calm down, Lister thought. Swagger. Grin. Girls like that. "Right. Hi." He could only hope the grin was not entirely idiotic.  
   
"My name is Kristine Kochanski, I'm an officer on board the Red Dwarf, and this is Lenore Case... investigator?" She looked questioningly at her companion, who Lister had so far only registered as the blue blobby sort of a figure who wasn't Krissie. He focused on her long enough to see blond hair and a cute smile. Yeah, whatever. "We'd like to ask you a few questions."  
   
"Right." He needed to stop saying 'right'.  
   
Kristine pulled an e-pad out of a purse she had slung around her shoulder. "You remember giving my friend a ride in your hopper last night?"  
   
"Your friend?" How good a friend? Could a man and a woman be friends? You could have all sorts of friends.  
   
"I don't know if you caught his name. Britt Reid? About this tall -" she held her hand way above her head, "White guy, curly hair--"  
   
"Yeah, I know Britt," said Lister. He had had a plan for this, hadn't he? Oh. Smeg. It had kind of involved not mentioning he knew Britt. Lister cursed inwardly. "Look, I'm just a guy who took a bad turn, you know. I'm not a bad person. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for one wild night a couple of years ago--"  
   
"Sorry," said Lenore Case, "but we don't actually need to know everything that happened in the past two--"  
   
"But you do," Lister insisted. "Otherwise you'll think I'm a crook. And I'm not. I'm a decent bloke. Always wanted to be a father." He couldn't help it. He looked at Kristine when he said it. She merely looked puzzled.  
   
"Right," said Case. "Well, Mr Lister, we need to find Britt Reid. He's close to being declared a deserter, and his father wants to know he's all right."

"Wait a minute," Lister said. "You're working for his father?"

Case shifted. "Well..."

"That's why he couldn't get any cash out! You knew he was on the run, so you froze his assets."

"It makes sense, don't you think?" Case said calmly. "I didn't want him running any further. Look, his father is--"  
   
Lister groaned. "The guy's like, what, thirty? I don't know his dad, but don't you think he should’ve let him grow up a decade ago?"  
   
"It's not really for me to judge," Case said carefully, "but I believe his father's words were, 'If he was man enough to grow up on his own I wouldn't have to watch him every damn moment to see that he does’.”  
   
"Oh, sure, that's going to smeggin' work." Lister snorted. Case smiled faintly. He got the impression she agreed with the sentiment, but was too professional to say so.  
   
Kristine cleared her throat. "Let's get back on track, shall we? You picked up my-- Britt Reid. Was he in the hopper when it crashed?"  
   
Lister thought about it for a moment. He weighed his options. On one hand, a guy he'd met last night who was all right but could be a bit of a smeghead. On the other, the girl he wanted to marry. If Lister betrayed Britt, maybe she'd like him better for helping her out.

Lister shook his head. No. The kind of guy who deserved to marry her would never rat out a friend. And yet, he couldn't lie to her either. This would be tricky. He cleared his throat. "Last night--"  
   
He got no further before a resonant boom interrupted him. The floor shook.  
   
"What was that?" Kristine asked, bewildered.  
   
Case was reaching into her purse for something small and mechanical that Lister almost recognized. "It sounded like--"  
   
There was another boom, louder, and now the floor shook hard enough to rattle the single chair against the floor. Then the lights went out.  
   
*  
   
Kang Wellesley-Smith was, all in all, having an above-average day. They'd even brought in his health chair not fifteen minutes after Lenore Case had asked about it. Could you believe that? He'd known they had those somewhere in the building. It couldn't have been anything but ill will that’d held them back all these months. It curved under his legs just so, and it was already doing wonders for his lumbago.  
   
It had only been the first victory of the day. Then, the sonic boom had reverberated through the building.  
   
A boom could be a lot of things. It could be a burst pipe. It could be a criminal gang or a rival police force – same difference – finally making a move on the station. It could be space aliens, even. Who knew? But there was one thing it definitely was: an evacuation situation.  
   
Kang picked up his backpack and his memo pad full of doodles and happily rushed to the emergency stairwell. He'd take space aliens over another day at the office anytime.  
   
Kang knew all the exits out of the building. If there was one thing he liked about the station, it was all the doors leading out of it. The third floor exit was right behind the lifts, half-hidden behind a dead soup dispenser. He was halfway there, dodging secretaries and confused officers, when the second boom hit. He stumbled, but kept his bearings. All those years of volunteering at Adventure Camp hadn't been for nothing.  
   
He had his hand on the doorknob when all went dark.  
   
It was okay. He was okay. They did this kind of thing all the time during the trust exercises. He turned the knob and felt his way into the stairwell. He found the rail.

There were raised, frightened voices behind him. He could just recognize Rita's voice not five feet behind him. He had never seen any direct proof, but he knew – knew – that Rita was the one who had passed around that nasty holographic slideshow making fun of the way he ate his turkey lunch sandwiches. Kang grinned in the darkness and closed the door behind him, very quietly. She'd never find it in the dark. He only wished there was a way to lock it.  
   
He held on to the rail and felt his way down.  
   
Kang heard the door burst open as daylight flooded into the hallway below him. The light disappeared with another bang from the door, but then another light, this one green and eerie, lit up the wall, flashing from one end to another. There was a low mutter in a man's voice, and the scuffle of feet and clothing.  
   
Kang stood frozen in the stairwell, holding on to the rail. They could be the attackers. He could end up a hostage victim, shot in the head as an example to the others. (It would still be so much better than most of his days.) He was still standing there when the green light hit him, blinding him.

"There's someone there!" said a voice with an American accent.  
   
"I know," said another, differently accented one. The next thing Kang knew, he was pinned between the wall and an iron grip choking him. It was just like in the films.  
   
"Who are you?" demanded the differently accented voice of the man holding him. The light was still trained on him, but some of it fell on the man's face. There was something odd about it. Was he wearing a... mask?  
   
"Wellesley-Smith, junior administrator slash affairs advisor,” Kang managed. "If you're here about fine payments or looking for someone to make an example of, ask for Rita."  
   
"We're here for David Lister and Squib the Frogger," demanded the American. "Tell us where to find them, or Kato here--"  
   
The other man, Kato, shushed him violently.  
   
"I mean... my part-- accomplice, er, 'Bruce' - he will kick your ass so hard you'll be sucking on his sock juice for a week. How’s that?"  
   
"Ew," said Kang.  
   
"Yeah, you wouldn't like that, would you?" said the American. "So, spill it!"  
   
"Sure, why not?" Kang shrugged. "Level minus two holding cells. Lister was moved to interrogation room three on the second floor about half an hour ago. The files go through me, you see. The junior administrator is informed by memo every hour of any planned--"  
   
"That means we can't get them both," 'Bruce' said, letting Kang go.

Kang slumped on the floor and pulled his shirt down straight, tucking it back in his trousers. "You thought you could get someone from level minus two?" He laughed out loud. It was too funny.  
   
"Shut up," snapped 'Bruce'.

"He's got a point," said the American.

"Shit. Okay, let's go get Dave. You," 'Bruce' pointed at Kang, "don't follow us."  
   
"Not planning to," Kang promised, and meant it. "Have a nice day."  
   
The American was already half up the stairs. 'Bruce' gave Kang one more uncertain look, then bounded after him.  
   
Kang went down the rest of the way and out into the crowd on the street. He'd have have a naughty sweet lunch in the pâtisserie today, and then browse a little at the market before reporting back at the station in the late afternoon, close to the end of his shift.  
   
If only every day was like this, he might even stop stealing office supplies.  
 


	8. Chapter Eight

Arnold Rimmer sat on his bunk — a metal slab with the thinnest plastic mattress and a threadbare blanket on it — and held his head in his hands. His head throbbed, and he moaned softly, rocking back and forth.   
   
This was worse than a nightmare. Rimmer tried to tell himself that none of this was anything new, nothing unexpected in a life filled with misfortune, but that didn't change the fact that this situation, right here, was quite possibly the low point of his already unpleasant existence. It did not sting quite as much as that time when he'd been invited to the captain's table and hadn't known that gazpacho soup was served cold, but it was lasting a lot longer, and this time he was fairly sure there was no recovering even the tiniest shred of the career he'd built for himself.   
   
He was waiting trial. He was almost certainly going to be found guilty. His career in the Space Corps, any chance of impressing his brothers or his parents, any chance of becoming the man he knew he was supposed to be, that he had struggled to become every day of his life…gone. Instead, he was about to become a convict.   
   
For how long? Who knew? And what would he have left to look forward to at the end of it? He would be lucky to get a job as a toilet-cleaner. Cleaning companies would probably worry that he'd steal the materials. He might get a job as a bouncer, but the idea was laughable. Rimmer, a bouncer? No matter how tough he might talk, he'd gotten beat up in school just for breathing, and he knew right down to his guts that the only sensible reaction to being menaced was to make a run for it. A bouncer? Hah! He didn't have the natural authority to command a weed to grow.   
   
The charges, he'd been told, were vandalism, desertion and being an accomplice to grand theft auto. Accomplice! All they had was circumstantial evidence, but Rimmer was a fan of courthouse reality television and he knew perps were nailed on circumstantial evidence more often than not. He didn't have the money for a hotshot lawyer, either. There was no other way to look at it: Arnold J. Rimmer's life was over.   
   
Rimmer began to grin. It happened without any conscious volition. The rocking stopped on its own, too. He released his head and sat up, his eyes wild.   
   
It was over.   
   
There was a loud boom. Rimmer barely noticed it.   
   
Then there was another boom, the lights flickered and died. Rimmer looked around in the darkness. Somewhere, someone started cursing.   
   
There was a click. The door of his cell slid open, pushed by no hand.   
   
*   
   
Lister stood up, the chair behind him clattering loudly on the floor.   
   
"Nobody move!" Case's voice cried out of the darkness. "Mr Lister, you should know that I'm carrying a stun-gun, so don't try anything."   
   
"I'm not going to 'try' anything!" Lister protested.   
   
"Hold on," said Kochanski's voice, surprisingly calm. A white, soft light lit up the darkness. She was holding an e-pad with a background light on, and he could now see the edges of the table and Case's figure outlined in the darkness.   
   
"Not a bad idea," Case said. She picked up two e-pads from her purse, lit one up herself and tossed another to Lister. Lister didn't have a lot of experience with e-pads - he'd never been much for pen-pushing - but with a couple of tries he got it to lit up.   
   
"So now what?" Kristine wondered. "Do we wait?"   
   
"The building seems to be under attack," Case pointed out. "I think we should get out of here."   
   
"What about him?"   
   
"Yeah, what about me?" Lister asked. "Look, I'm not a bad guy. I'm just a little down on me luck, yeah? Look at it this way: If you leave me or lock me in this room, I may die, and I don't mean to bring you guys down or anything, but that would kind of be your fault, don't you think?"   
   
"I suppose," said Case, sounding amused. She wasn't supposed to sound amused. Lister continued regardless.   
   
"But, if you take me with you, I promise not to run. And even if I do run, Case here's a P.I. and Kris- Ms Kochanski's Space Corps, right? So how far am I gonna get? And, even if by some miracle I do get away, it won't be your fault, will it? The place was under attack. There was chaos. These things happen."   
   
Somewhere out in the corridor there were more sounds of crashes, some screaming, and the patter of running feet. The station was arming itself. "I see no downside," Kristine said.

Lister could see Case spread her hands in the soft illumination of the e-pads. "Why not? Let's go. I saw an emergency stairwell by the elevators."   
   
They made their way out into the anteroom of the interrogation room, which was empty save for a couple of chairs set up for observers. If anyone had been watching the interview outside, they must have rushed out. The corridor outside was as dark as the interrogation room. Mimas Security didn't believe in windows. "To the right," Case instructed.   
   
"Somebody's got a light!" came a voice as soon as they entered into the wider lobby area. "Who's there?" Lister pointed his e-pad and could see one knocked-over shelf and a few dark shapes.   
   
"The lift's not working," said another.   
   
Behind the reception desk, someone was crying.   
   
"We're--" Case began, but there was a loud clatter as a door flew open on the far side of the room. A bright green flashlight lit up the room. It was almost as bright as a light fixture, and Lister had to blink away sudden blindness. He held his hand up to shield his eyes. Dark shadows moved behind the light.  
   
Kochanski had grabbed a chair leaning against the wall and brandished it as a weapon. Case, standing at his other side, was holding up a stun gun in a professional manner. Lister took a step back, wondering if he could throw the e-pad at them or something--   
   
"Dave!" Britt cried out. "There you are, buddy! We thought we'd have to look all over for you."   
   
It couldn't be. Lister's jaw dropped.   
   
"You know these guys?" Case asked sharply. "Who the hell--"   
   
A tall figure moved in front of the green light. He was dressed in a long flowing coat and a hat, and there was something strange about his face. The voice was unmistakable, though.   
   
"One more step and you're dead," Case called out in an authoritative voice. "I mean it."   
   
"Get back!" said Kato's voice from behind Britt - because that was who they were, there was no doubt about it. Britt hesitated, and the light switched off.   
   
At its sudden absence, what little use the e-pads had been disappeared. Lister was blind.  
   
"Watch out!" Case hissed, but there was a scuffle, a sudden movement and a clatter as her gun hit the floor. She didn't cry out, but grabbed Lister by the chest and pushed him back.   
   
"Guys, stop it, they're all right!" Lister cried out. "Case, for smeg's sake, relax! It's him! It's Britt!"   
   
"Hey, no giving away my secret identity!" Britt said from somewhere nearby. Case released her hold on Lister's shirt as she was suddenly yanked to the side. Lister could just see dark arms wrap around her and hold her still. Kochanski yelped as Britt caught her wrists.   
   
"Britt?" Kochanski asked, her voice sounding incredulous. "Oh, Britt, what have you got yourself into? And what the hell are you wearing?"   
   
"Krissie?" He let go of her. Now Lister could see what was so off about his face - Britt was wearing a mask. An actual mask, like a carnival accessory, all black and gleaming. What a smegger. "What are you doing here?"   
   
"We've only got another five minutes," Kato said. Case was struggling against him, making muffled angry sounds under his gloved hand. He tossed Britt something. Britt fumbled but caught it. "Third one on the bottom. Hit it."   
   
"Serious?"   
   
"We're out of time."   
   
"Wicked."   
   
Kochanski made a grab for the remote in Britt's hand, but she was too late. He snatched his hand away and pushed the button.

At first, nothing happened. Then, the wall on their right came crashing down.  
   
When the smoke cleared, the room was full of Mimas' red sunlight. The wall had turned into a gaping hole, its edges into bent and blackened. Outside hovered the Narayanan Imperial, folding its guns back into its body.   
   
Kato threw Case backwards; she stumbled and fell onto one of the station's uncomfortable waiting couches. He picked up her gun from the floor and pointed it at her.   
   
Now that there was light, Lister could see they were both dressed in dark suits with hats, gloves and masks. They looked like something out of a comic book.  Britt tossed the remote back to Kato, who guided the hovercar inside with one hand, holding the gun in the other.   
   
"Oh no," Case said. "Don't even think about it. Britt, be sensible. Your father--"   
   
"Who the hell are you?" Britt snapped. "What do you know about my father?"   
   
"He wants you to come home."   
   
Britt paused. "Bullshit."   
   
"Let's go!" Kato urged.   
   
Lister was thinking. Become a runaway, or face even more charges and whatever Security decided those entailed. Either way, all his plans for a respectable career were crumbling.   
   
As long as he had freedom, he had a chance, right? Lister started to grin. "You guys are totally off your rockers," he said. He bounded towards the hovercar and hopped up on to the backseat. Britt was right behind him. Kato hung back to make sure Case and Kochanski weren't following, then pulled himself up into the driver's seat.   
   
"Wait!"   
   
Just as the doors were about to close, a foldout chair jammed the passenger seat side door. "Take me with you!" wailed a familiar voice – familiar, but not welcome.

Lister peered out from the back window and saw, to his astonishment, the determined face of Rimmer peering at him from behind the chair. "What the smeg?"   
   
"I'll make it worth your while! I'll give you inside information! All my expertise in astronavigation! Please!"

"Why should we trust you?" Kato shouted.

"They're going to lock me up," Rimmer whined. "I've nothing to live for!"

"If you have nothing to live for, why do you want to?" Lister asked.

"Because I'm a smegging coward, okay? I can't handle prison! Just let me in!"

"Let him in, for smeg's sake," said Lister, though he knew he might come to regret those words yet. "He's holding us up."

Kato hesitated for another half-second, and then hit the door release. Rimmer scrambled up to the passenger seat.

"Thank God you--"

Right behind him was Lenore Case. "You're not going anywhere without me."

"Oh no you don't," said Rimmer and tried to push her out. "This is my seat."

"Britt, your father--"

"Shut up about my father!" Britt shouted.

"I have a job to do, goddammit!"

"We're crazy, dangerous criminals! We're not going to--"

The door snapped shut behind her. She pulled her foot in just in time, but lost a shoe in the process. Just as she did, a machine gun fire ripped through the room. The shields weren't up, and one of the N-Imp's reinforced glasses took four bullets. They stuck in the glass like smashed flies. Kato turned the car around and zoomed out of the hole in the wall.

Lister pressed his nose to the glass. He just caught one brief glance at Kochanski's pale, upturned face before she, the room and the station sped out of sight. The air shimmered. They were cloaked.

He'd likely never see her again.

He remembered feeling this way before, a long time ago, back when he'd been living with his Grandma. It wasn't quite disappointment, not quite despair, but just the grim, inescapable knowledge of something being distinctly wrong in the world that could never be made right, because the world didn't actually give a toss about right and wrong.

He'd barely had a minute the savour that hollow terror before he heard the engines.


	9. Chapter Nine

Lister strapped himself into the weapons command station's seat and took up the controls. He had the Black Beauty's starboard cannons, the topmost of which was still only half-repaired since their last tangle with the law. "Remember to lock that down before you fire," Lenore had instructed him. If he tried to fire it, it might blow and end up damaging their own ship.

A red light was blinking in the command centre's walls, lighting up the cramped space. The ship was no larger than a regular sub-orbital craft, so space was in short supply. It was black, sleek and handsome, sure, but most of its bulk was taken up by machinery.

"Keep the shields up," Lenore said now from the central comm. "There's no reason to make it easier on the fighters to spot us. Britt, do you know how to do that shimmer thing of Kato's by now?"

"Sure," Britt said from the nav station. The artificial gravity made sure they didn't feel a thing, but the readout told him the ship was shimmying in place and flashing through different shield settings. It sometimes confuses Space Corps sensors.

Lister's hands flew across the controls. His screen showed up six fighters and a mothership not two clicks away. This was not good. Evasive maneuvers were their best chance right now, but even then they'd have to take out a couple of the fighters and probably end up sustaining more damage.

"We're only on about half-charge," said Rimmer from the adjacent, left-hand weapons station.

"Kato, how's the back-up generator coming along?" Lenore asked into the internal communication outlet at her left hand.

Kato's voice came back tinny but clear. "Working on it. Fifteen minutes, we should get a burst, at least."

Lister glanced over at her. She took a deep breath, but her face was set in grim determination. "Make it good, guys," she instructed. "You know what to do by now."

They did.

They'd been on the Black Beauty for seven months, now, ever since they broke Mimas orbit less than twenty-four hours after they’d been introduced and all their lives, such as they were, had been mutually blown apart.

After the break-out from the security station, Kato had taken that tank of a hovercar - which, it turned out, he called the Black Wasp - over the top of Mimas' regular traffic and the government houses, trailed by a security suborbital mothership. No hovercar, even a Narayanan Imperial tricked out to the max, could go half the speed of a top-class military fighter for long. Lister had had some moments of terror when Kato had steered the car directly into that lake in the exclusive public park, but preparing for a watery death had proven premature. There was an old tunnel under the water, sustained behind a forcefield which it turned out Kato controlled, and beyond the tunnel, the station that had housed the Black Beauty.

The Black Beauty was a military grade spaceship from a few years ago, stolen from the Space Corps by pirates and traded to Sääski for an extremely good price. He'd learned why soon enough - the ship was impossible to move. You couldn't sell the ship - it was too obviously swiped from the military - and you couldn't sell the parts, for the same reason. Almost all of the recyclable parts were specific to space ships and much too advanced to be fitted into commercial models. And so, the Beauty had been kept underground for Kato to play with.

It hadn't taken long for security ships to pummel through the forcefield and follow them in the wake of a tidal wave that used to be the ornamental lake, but by that time they had driven the hovercar into the spaceship, knocked it off its legs and sped down the adjacent tunnel. They ended up going through a department store, adding a few more counts of assault and destruction of property to their charges, and then they had been up, up towards the open sky.

That is, if by "open sky" you meant no further than a light year from the sun, because that was as far as they could go on solar power. The one thing Kato hadn't been able to fit the ship with was an interstellar level energy converter. If they went too far, their engines would die, but as long as they stayed close, they were in danger of being picked up on the sensors of any passing Space Corps ship.

They were running out of food, too. Nobody was saying it yet, but everybody was thinking about it. No food meant no life. They'd have to use the ship for the one thing it was good for, and turn pirate.

Heroes, pirates - not much of a difference if you were a comic book writer. It all depended on what you did it for, and how.

Lister had expected Lenore and Rimmer to be trouble, but he'd been wrong. By the time they broke orbit, Lenore had quieted down. Lister remembered seeing a kind of a thoughtful look on her face not long before she had done a complete 180.

She had planned the routes between the planets that were less likely to be patrolled. She'd shown Kato how to hack into the Space Corps network to find out their routes. She had proposed - and executed - the rationing system. Thinking back, Lister could tell she had been digging them the trenches they needed already, even back then.

They didn't call her captain. They didn't need to.

It wasn't too hard to figure out why she'd had that change of heart, either. If they'd been caught on Mimas, she could have easily argued she was kidnapped or told the truth - that she'd been hanging on to her prey. After they broke orbit, she'd have a harder time making that stick unless she chose right then to sabotage the ship instead. Sabotage would not be possible so long as the others were watching her, and would likely endanger her, too.

There was more to it - maybe one day, he'd figure out everything about her. It was enough to trust her, for now.

Rimmer, for his part, seemed up for anything. He never complained, he never asked for anything, and he kept to himself, quietly studying, almost as if in penance. He cried at night, though, in his sleep. Lister heard him from the top bunk of the cramped cabin they shared. He barely seemed like the same man.

Kato was kept busy with the repairs and upkeep. Lister helped him out whenever he could. He'd never worked so hard for anything in his life, but then again, he'd never had nothing but a failing ship between himself and oblivion before.

The funny thing was, he was now more like the man he'd wanted to be for Krissie than he'd been when he had been free to marry her.

Seven months, and he was still thinking about her. Smeg.

Kato and Britt had got into some kind of a competition for Lenore's favour, despite the fact she didn't seem interested in either of them. They had even come to blows and ended up sulking at each other for a week. Lister assumed she must just not be his type, because he looked at her and all he could see was someone who was smart, capable, strong, devious, dangerous, in control, beautiful, and not Krissie Kochanski.

Lister was jolted back into the present as a blast of fire from the mothership whizzed by the Beauty. Britt steered the ship to the side just in time.

They were smack in the middle of open space. There were no moons to hide behind, no planetoids or meteor showers to use as cover or distraction. Just them and a bag of tricks that, as was becoming obvious, wasn't going to be enough. Running was not an option, either. You couldn't keep the shields up and still have enough available power to get away - and dropping the shields would be disastrous.

"Starboard six fifteen," Lenore called sharply. Lister saw the two fighters and trained his guns on them. He hit one, which didn't burst but spun away, crippled. The other one dodged his first blast with an elegant slide. He fired another volley and hit it square in the back, obliterating the craft's top.

He let out a small breath, and felt the by-now familiar sting of guilt. Every time, he told himself it must have been a droid ship. Every time, he knew it probably wasn't. Military thinkers still believed in the personal touch - or so he'd been told once by a veteran whose limbs were all cheap, failing cybernetic replacements.

"Oh, smeg. Guys." Britt's voice came from the nav station. "Seven thirty, long range."

Lister switched on his long range nav.

'Oh smeg' was right. There were five more mother ships - a military fleet. Two had broken off from the fleet and were heading their way, fast.

He turned around in his chair. All the others were sitting frozen, staring at their screens. Lenore's face was expressionless, which was scarier than any look of terror would have been.

Lister understood her. What could you say? 'So, gentlemen, it appears we're about to die,' as if they were in a film or on some historical battlefield where everybody was scrambling to say the best and most memorable last words? Well, there was no point in that out here. Nobody was going to record their last moments. They were going to be less than a stain on the corner of some minute record of Space Corps operations, winked out of history and no more significant than some Egyptian mud-digger thrown into the Nile thousands of years ago whose misshapen finger bone would later be mistaken for a dinosaur fossil.

The communication microphone fizzed into life on the central comm. "Charger's online," came Kato's voice.

"Thank you, Kato," said Lenore. "Leave it."

"Come again?"

"Leave it and come up here, Kato. Please."

The remaining four fighters had positioned themselves around the Black Beauty, their guns trained on them. Lister wasn't sure if the shields were still up, or whether Britt had switched them off. It didn't seem to matter.

Kato showed up on the doorway. "Guys, there are four--"

"We know, buddy," Britt said from his station.

Lenore stood up. "Well, we've lost at last. Let's hope they give us a trial. Guys, I'm sorry. I should have..." She stopped, frowned, and looked at her readout. "Guys. Something's weird."

Lister checked his readout. Kato leaned over him to view it as well. "They're gone," he said.

It was true. The enemy ships had disappeared - long range and short. Instead, the stars had changed. Lister couldn't recognize them. They were alone in this two light year radius except for one single other ship. The camera display showed it as a green, bulby kind of a shuttle ship

"That's Starbug class," Britt said. "That's weird. What's a mining shuttle doing alone in this space?"

"And what the smeg is this space?" Rimmer asked.

Lenore cried out. Lister looked around and saw two men standing at the doorway to the central comm room. They had not been there two seconds ago.

"Relax, guys!" said the large, blond one with the intricately tattooed arms, grinning from ear to ear. "It's us! Hello, Lister, you old dog!"

All eyes of the Beauty's crew turned to Lister. "I've never seen them before in my life!" he protested, and it was true. Neither of the men looked familiar.

"Come on, mate," said the shorter, dark one. "I'm Chen, he's Petersen."

"Oh, he's not going to remember you," said a third voice, and Lister's heart did a flip. "Different timeline, remember?" A third figure pushed herself through the two men and flashed him a smile that lit up her face like a pinball machine hitting the jackpot.

"Hello, Dave," said Kristine Kochanski. "We're from the future, and we're here to save your life."

That was all right, then. Lister pushed his leather deerstalker back and grinned at her. "You've made a good start."


End file.
